Today, various content filtering mechanisms are provided to entities to manage and/or control user access to the Internet via facilities provided by the entities. For example, a company typically implements some form of content filtering mechanism to control the use of the company's computers and/or servers to access the Internet. Access to content within certain predetermined categories using the company's computers and/or servers may not be allowed during some predetermined periods of time.
One conventional content filtering mechanism is described below. A typical content filtering client, which resides in a firewall device, sends a request for the content rating of a web page in response to each web page browsed. The content rating requests are routed to a separate content rating server. When the content rating server receives a request, the content rating server retrieves the content rating for that request from a database and sends the content rating to the content filtering client.
Based on the content rating retrieved, the content filtering client determines whether the user is allowed to access the web page. If the user is allowed, then a request is sent to get the web page from the host of the web page. Otherwise, no request is sent to the web page host. Thus, the content filtering client typically receives the content rating before requesting the web page. As a result, a delay in getting the content rating may increase the latency in delivering the web page to the user in some existing systems. Depending on how long it takes the content filtering client to get the content rating, the user may experience a noticeable delay in accessing the web page. As such, the communication time and frequency with the content rating server (e.g., proximity, server performance, etc.) affects the performance of this process, but such content rating servers are relatively expensive as compared to network bandwidth.